Pastor agrees that religious Radio 4 slot needs reformation

A pastor has agreed with two Radio 4 presenters who have criticised the long-running religious slot 'Thought for the Day'.

The daily slot on the Today programme on Radio 4, which features a religious person speaking for 2 minutes and 45 seconds, has been accused of being irrelevant to a mostly non-religious audience.

In an interview with the Radio Times, presenter John Humphrys said it was "deeply, deeply boring".

He said: "Sometimes it's good and the guy or woman is delivering an interesting thought in a provocative way.

"It seems to me inappropriate that Today should broadcast nearly three minutes of uninterrupted religion, given that rather more than half our population have no religion at all."

Nicholls, who's also the director of Affinity, a partnership of gospel-believing churches told Premier he sides with Humphrys.

He said: "I think it is a pretty boring slot.

"It's dull because it's kind of empty of anything cutting edge.

"It is difficult to compress to about two and a half minutes something that is meaningful and punchy"

Nicholls said that for non-Christian it just encourages people to be nice to each other and that even for Christians "it doesn't really have a lot of bite to it normally, it's fairly bland and fairly unchallenging and sometimes, even worse than that, it's actually contradicting what the Christian message is."

He concluded that he would like the segment to continue, but for the Christians invited on to think carefully about how listeners could actually be provoked to think about their life and about Jesus.

He also said he was happy for Atheists to be on and challenged on their beliefs.